Apple Fail!? The iPhone 3GS on iOS 5

Oct 07 2011

I still use the oldest phone that Apple currently sells, the iPhone 3GS, but I’ve now upgraded to iOS 5 GM. To my surprise, the golden master runs much faster than previous beta versions of iOS 5.

Of course, speed is a relative thing — it’s possible that the phone is no faster than it was some months ago, and that I’m now just noticing the difference between last month’s beta version and this week’s golden master, but it certainly feels like the fastest 3GS I’ve ever used!

Sure, I won’t be getting Siri and the camera still takes ages to load up, but I’m suddenly finding myself rather content with my 2-year old phone.

One thing that’s been majorly improved is mobile Safari; it seems to run a whole lot faster these days. I’m actually using it again as my primary browser, at least when I’m on wifi.

Additionally, now that wireless syncing, cloud syncing and over-the-air updates are available, the phone has become effortless to manage.

What I’m trying to get at, is that this aging obsolete smartphone has just dramatically increased in value. This is totally unexpected considering the nature of the product and the fact that it is now two produce cycles behind the latest iPhone.

Apple is making me think twice about upgrading!

Apple Fail?!

8 responses so far

Siri: It’s More Than Just Voice Commands

Oct 06 2011

iPhone 4S Siri

After reading reactions to Siri in the comments section of various tech blogs, it seems to me that a significant portion of commenters believe that the feature is little more than voice recognition technology re-packaged by Apple. True, it performs speech-to-text rather brilliantly (like all Nuance-based solutions), but surely Apple didn’t pay $200 million for just voice commands.

Siri is a unique service that boldly promises artificial intelligence on your iPhone: It can guess the intention of your commands — even when you’re being somewhat vague — and can use past information to help interpret future requests.

It’s clear that Siri isn’t just a collection of voice command templates, as some would have you believe; there’s something a lot more clever happening behind the scenes.

Also, one would have to ask, if Siri-like features were easy to develop, why aren’t there other competitors out there? It was public knowledge when Apple purchased Siri a year and a half ago, and yet today, Siri is without rivals.

Back in 2007, Apple’s implementation of multi-touch revolutionized mobile computing. But today, Apple has dwarfed that achievement. The company has likely opened the door for AI and natural language commands to hit the mainstream; this is textbook Apple!

True, Siri is not yet HAL 9000 — we’re still, literally, in the beta days of this cutting-edge technology, and furthermore, it’s debuting on some relatively low-powered hardware — but does anyone doubt that AI and natural voice command will become must-have features on all mobile devices in the years to come? How about on all computing devices?

3 responses so far

This Blog Uses CommentLuv Premium For DoFollow Back Links

Oct 02 2011

Want a “do follow”, keyword-loaded backlink from Aibal.com?

Read on.

I’ve just installed CommentLuv premium on Aibal.com. I hope it will strike a balance between offering bloggers a potentially valuable backlink and keeping my site high-quality and spam-free.

Here are the rules I’ve tentatively set:

  1. Comments are now instantly approved, so long as you don’t trip the spam filter. As alway, I’ll manually screen the comments afterwards, so don’t waste your time leaving short, off-topic or low-quality remarks.
  2. If you Google +1 my post, CommentLuv will set your backlink to Do Follow.
  3. If you ReTweet or Facebook Like my post, I’ll let you select one of your last 10 blog posts. (Otherwise it will just backlink your most recent post — unless you own CommentLuv premium!)
  4. If you have 2 comments approved on my site (use the same name and email), I’ll let you input KeywordLuv style anchor text. The format is: Name@keyword1 keyword2 keyword 3.

You can have it all — keyword loaded, do follow backlinks — and these perks are automatically handled by CommentLuv premium, so the effects should be instantaneous!

As CommentLuv will likely increase the amount of commenters and spammers to my site, I’ll probably tweak the rules as time goes on to maintain a high quality environment. So I’m not making any long-term promises here, but I’m hopeful this plugin is the solution I’ve been looking for; I love the idea of offering incentives.

And finally, if you haven’t gotten it yet, I highly recommend trying CommentLuv premium. Think of it as an automated bribe system! :)

13 responses so far

Banned By Akismet: How To Stay Off Their Blacklist

Sep 18 2011

Banned by Akismet

Recently, I discovered that Akismet banned one of my sites.

I’ve used blog commenting as a means to build back links for years. Through all the updates to Google’s ranking algorithms and quality filters, dropping a URL in a blog comment has always produced great results; it’s the one strategy that I trust and depend on.

And let me be clear — when I comment, I always produce a well-written, on-topic blurb that is often like a mini-article in and of itself. I put in the time and effort to give something of value back to the high quality blogs that I comment on. These are the kinds of blogs that have high PR value and offer do follow links.

Well, blog commenting worked great until Akismet labelled me a comment spammer!

 

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13 responses so far

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